Walk On The Water, Cont'd

Perhaps if enough peopleget into the streets and yell at the right buildings, and enough people know it, change will come, one small step at a time.

"In case we have missed someone who has legitimate affordability problems this will allow them to come to us to see if they can work out payments," department spokesman Bill Johnson said. "We've always maintained that what we were doing was a collection effort - not a shutoff effort."

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Hilarious. "A collection effort -- not a shutoff effort." And loan sharks engage in "collection efforts" and not "leg-breaking."

I walked with some of those folks on Saturday. I walked with nurses who have been trying to do their jobs in homes without water. I walked with retired autoworkers who wonder why the golf courses get to be hundreds of thousands of dollars in arrears while they lose their water for owing $150. I walked with old women and young men, and old men and young women, who were demanding the most basic democratic and the most common benefits of the political commonwealth, and almost all of them were amazed that they had to march for it. That was the overriding feeling in the march -- a kind of exhausted incredulity that they were marching for water. As our conservative scolds often remind us, there is something to be said for public shaming and, among other people, Steven Rhodes, the bankruptcy judge handling the case of the city of Detroit, appears to be getting quite fed up with presiding over a rolling national public-relations disaster.

Rhodes, overseeing the city's historic $18-billion insolvency, took the department to task last week for international attention brought to the city's efforts to shut off water service to customers who can't or don't pay their bills. Thousands of households have been shut off in recent months. Latimer said the pause does not mean the city will end its efforts to get customers to pay up, with tens of millions in unpaid bills that end up being passed along to paying customers. While the City of Detroit has made tremendous progress over the past year toward crafting a plan to emerge from bankruptcy, its effort to shore up the finances of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department has been heavily criticized and has captured the attention of the national media. Critics have portrayed water service as an essential human right.

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I do not think I ever conceived of water having to be "portrayed" as a human right. (The United Nations seems similarly gobsmacked.) What I do know is that, if we continue to fk ourselves on the issue of climate change, water will become dear, and people will find ways to profit from it, and then we will have water wars and water refugees, and all the attendant problems we've had fighting over land or oil. (An awful lot of the sanguinary history of the ancient world was fought over water, or over bodies thereof.) And the indications that we are ever going to unfk ourselves on the issue of climate change is getting worse by the moment. In Australia, which you may have last noticed because it was burning down, they elected a government that promised to repeal the country's carbon tax. Let us pause and contemplate. The winners ran (and won) on a platform to undo one of the very few things that we know can help reduce carbon emissions and ameliorate the effects of climate change. The country voted for that. And the prime minister, Tony Abbott, who is an all-in climate denier, did what he said he would do.

But Prime Minister Tony Abbott's government, which argued the cost was being passed to consumers, resulting in higher utility bills, has also faced a storm of criticism since the axing last Thursday. It has been led by EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard and environmental activist Al Gore, who said Australia was "falling behind other major industrialised nations in the growing global effort to reduce carbon emissions". Conservation groups have also been scathing, and many experts have been left scratching their heads. Roger Jones, a Research Fellow at the Victoria Institute of Strategic Economic Studies, called the repeal "the perfect storm of stupidity". "It's hard to imagine a more effective combination of poor reasoning and bad policy making," he said. "A complete disregard of the science of climate change and its impacts. Bad economics and mistrust of market forces."